5 Reasons Why Kate McKinnon Will Be Comedy’s Next Superstar

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Perhaps not since Andy Samberg has one person risen to the title of Your New Favorite Saturday Night Live Cast Member as swiftly as Kate McKinnon. And with good reason. From Justin Bieber impressions to skits like “Dyke & Fats” with her frequent partner-in-crime Aidy Bryant, she’s consistently knocked it out of the park during her time at 30 Rock.

More and more, though, McKinnon’s been showing that her skills stretch far beyond sketch comedy. Her appearance in the sports comedy Intramural, in which she plays “a bitch” named Vicky, has been playing film festivals throughout the spring and summer. Later this month, the Big Gay Sketch Show alum will make her debut in Seth Meyers’ animated superhero spoof The Awesomes on Hulu.

The show is packed with SNL vets like Bill Hader, Bobby Moynihan, Kenan Thompson, Amy Poehler, and now McKinnon, who voices Lola Gold, a TV producer/supervillain who tries to convince the rag-tag Awesomes superhero team to take part in a reality show. It’s a character she took to easily. “The script is so funny and you really don’t have to do much besides say the lines as written,” McKinnon says, humbly. “So I mostly just did that.” Luckily for all of us, the show (which posts new episodes each Monday) still gave McKinnon an opportunity to give Lola a unique McKinnon-esque voice. The comedienne crushed it on SNL this year (so much so that she got nominated for an Emmy) with characters like Russian woman Olga Povlatsky and German chancellor Angela Merkel (“oh, ze things I have Googled!”), and says that while the scripts for The Awesomes were fantastic, “there’s always a little bit of improv.” And that’s where McKinnon shines. Here are a few reasons she’s about to be comedy’s next big superheroine.

She’s the Queen of Characters—Even When That Character Is Animated

McKinnon is a master at character-building, whether the person she’s working on is real or made up. (This is someone who once cracked up Ellen DeGeneres by impersonating Ellen DeGeneres, after all.) So naturally, she wanted to bring her own flavor to Lola even though she is an animated character. Lola was funny in the script, McKinnon says, but she came prepared with lots of ideas on how to do her voice, which she then hashed out with the Awesomes crew. “There’s always a twist, I’m queen of the twist,” she says. “I always bring in a Mary Poppins bag of different voices that I have in mind for it.”

She Got Nominated for an Emmy—For Talking About Having Sex at Her Parents’ House

In addition to a nomination for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series (“I’m beyond shocked … I still think it might be a joke”), McKinnon was also nominated for an Emmy as one of the writers of the SNL music-video short “(Do It On My) Twin Bed,” which is about exactly what you think it’s about: trying to find a way to bone while staying with family over the holidays. “Aidy [Bryant] and I wanted to do an all-girl music video and dress up like sex kittens because we wanted to be badasses,” she says. “We knew it was the only time we would get to do that in our lives.” She wrote the sketch with Bryant and SNL writers Chris Kelly, Sarah Schneider, and Eli Brueggemann (music), and says the idea literally just came from someone pitching the idea What about when you go home and you have to have sex in your twin bed? “It just started flowing from there,” she says. “Aidy and Chris and Sarah are just so smart and amazing and we just, you know, pooped it out!” (The song didn’t score a statue at the Creative Arts Emmys on Saturday, but we’ll find out if McKinnon wins for outstanding supporting actress when the Emmys air August 25.)

She Would Be a Great Ghostbuster

For what seems like eons, there’s been talk of rebooting Ghostbusters. Then, earlier this month, word came out that Paul Feig—the director behind Bridesmaids and The Heat—was being eyed to direct a reboot of the franchise, with a female ensemble donning the proton packs. It seems like the perfect role for McKinnon—but even though she says she’d “kill” to be a Ghostbuster, she’s stumped when it comes to who she’d like to roll with in Ecto-1. “There are really too many funny women now to be accommodated in a single movie,” McKinnon says. “It should be a cast of thousands.”

Her Next Big Movie Stars a Couple of Folks You May Have Heard of: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler

McKinnon’s character on The Awesomes, Lola. courtesy Hulu

Speaking of funny women, McKinnon’s next movie, The Nest, stars two of the funniest comediennes working: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. The flick comes from SNL scribe Paula Pell (even if you don’t know her name, you’ve laughed at her jokes or at her cameos on 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation) and director Jason Moore, who had a slam-dunk with Pitch Perfect. McKinnon has already been filming on it, but is tight-lipped about who she plays in the flick. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to release any details about it,” she says. “I’m so sorry!”

She Has No Shame

One of the best things a comic can have—or not have, more accurately—is an utter inability to be embarrassed. McKinnon has that in spades. Last season on SNL she actually licked Louis C.K.’s head in a sketch set during last call at a bar. “You really go for it on air in a way that none of us have seen,” Meyers told her when she appeared on Late Night. “It’s the rarest of things at SNL, which is that even at air, I think, the cast and the writing staff is like, ‘Oh we have to make sure we’re on the floor for this because Kate’s going to put her tongue places it hasn’t been.'” Luckily for Meyers, she put that same gusto into being hired for his Awesomes. “I was going to go to him and grovel, but he asked me before I was forced to do that,” McKinnon says. “I was going to cry, beg, something. I was going to be a part of it either way.”